Authoritarianism

In this month’s newsletter, I’m following up on the article from last month (here) that discussed the importance of play in dark personal and political times. But how one is to play I left to address in this article, so below you’ll find my thoughts about the hows and whys of play, as well as a grab-bag of ideas for very particular instances of play. I don’t mean any of them as prescriptive, or claim they’ll be to your taste; instead, they are presented to give an overall flavor of the experiential and behavioral modes of play across just a handful of possible life domains. When one starts grokking (or often for adults, remembering) the heft and feel of play, one’s mind tends to respond with an outpouring of ideas. When we feel safe and oriented, we play.

So, I hope this article gives weight to the theory of the previous newsletter, and that you come away with a little bit more encouragement to play as a general rule, and particularly at dark times, and some ideas that point to how that play mode feels and flows.

I’ve been recently thinking a lot about play. Last year I put out a broadcast to my professional email lists and collected a small group of psychotherapists interested in experimenting with role-playing games as applied to psychotherapy (and group process). This was engendered by a surge of creative and playful energy released by finishing a very not-playful PhD dissertation several years ago. It might seem from the outside like this would be a diversion or distraction from the serious endeavor of the healer, but what I found confirmed what I learned as a young activist in the 1990s and from my work treating depression: play is one of the most serious things we can do.

The following article attempts to articulate that. It’s a big subject, so this is not a treatise or manifesto, but rather an attempt to reflect and comment on the psychological realities of living in authoritarian regimes, one’s own depression being one of them. May it be useful as inspiration and validation to figure out how to weave play both into one’s external and internal revolutions, to fighting with serious play and playful seriousness, for what is the through-line of goodness that defines this collective human life.